This week, I received a phone call from a very distressed mum. Linda's adult daughter's operation for endometriosis had gone horribly wrong and for a while, things could have gone either way. She faces a very long road to recovery and naturally, her mum and dad wantto be with her.
Not only do they want to be there – they need to be there. Their son in law is working hard to keep his business going but somebody has to be at home to assist a very sick young woman.
So Linda and her husband applied for an exemption to cross the border from Auckland. They had a supporting letter from their daughter's physician; they had been doubled vaxxed; they had negative Covid tests. And they were denied. Not once, but twice.
Linda rang me in tears. She couldn't understand how the decision had been reached and certainly nobody within the faceless bureaucracy would tell her. She needed to be with her daughter; her daughter needed her mum. And some faceless, soulless individual with no ability to assess risk denied her a permit to leave her home and travel to her daughter's.
I told her to just go. Just go and try her luck at the border.
People who know how to play the system are coming and going at will. But she said she'd never broken a law in her life and she "didn't want the police coming knocking at her door".
How has it come to this? A border around Auckland? Applying for a permit to travel within our own country?
Police at an essential travel checkpoint in Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig
A law-abiding woman who has clearly never even picked a flower through a fence without asking permission torn in two between the desperate desire to be with her family and her lifelong discipline to following the rules.
There are so many, many stories like this and I hear them every day on talkback. Some aren't quite so tragic, but they're all incomprehensible.
A builder in the Waikato who has three house frames up but isn't allowed to travel through the Auckland border to finish them. A lot of his tools are in Auckland – secure – but he can't do some jobs in his home region because he needs those tools. He's double vaxxed, has returned two negative Covid tests – and he's denied.
He said one of his mates just chanced it at the border, but he didn't want to make any trouble. He said he'd had faith in the system, but that was evaporating.
Why is it the law-abiding, the good citizens are the ones who are suffering the most? And how can the Ministry of Health and MBIE hide behind their communications staff and refuse to justify how they make the decisions they make?
Since August 31, more than 3000 exemptions have been granted and 19,000 have been refused. That's 19,000 stories of pain and frustration and anger. And MBIE, which handles work exemptions, and the Health Ministry, which manages personal travel exemptions, refuse to explain themselves.
Their communications staff are happy to provide written statements in response to questions but they will not front a real person who can justify how they arrive at the decisions that are causing so many New Zealanders immeasurable pain. How very bloody dare they?
MBIE Minister Stuart Nash and Health Minister Andrew Little need to front the people of Auckland, look them in the eye and tell them how the decisions are made, what sort of experience those decision makers have in risk assessment and who is accountable when people get these decisions wrong.
The mental anguish so many people are suffering is intolerable.
The bureaucrats don't see that. But the men and women manning the border do.
The Police Association has said police officers thought they'd be there for weeks not months and they're burnt out.
Besides, aren't there murders and gang battles and drug rings to be policed? More people have died as a result of murder than Covid this lockdown. This can't go on.
Historically, artificial borders have never worked. This one won't hold for much longer.
